Another Earth by Mike Cahill (review)

Much like the still image of Jupiter that protagonist Rhoda (Brit Marling) describes as 'nothing special until shown in rapid succession', Mike Cahill's debut feature appears low-key and mundane until examined closely. In an era of effects-laden franchise reboots, Another Earth feels quite different. Rhoda, a budding student of science and astronomy, has just been accepted into MIT when a new planet is suddenly discovered, a parallel Earth quickly dubbed Earth 2. Her future is altered forever when she has a car accident that kills the wife and child of John (William Mapother), a composer and professor of music. Four years later, Rhoda emerges from prison just as first contact with Earth 2 is being formally established.

Using spare, rocky beachscapes, Cahill renders the familiar location of the suburban US (in this case, New Haven, Connecticut) as eerily spectacular as a moonscape. Suddenly, that which was once unremarkable becomes sublime. This rapturous treatment of the grey, blue and white tones of the beach also characterise the framing of such mundane tasks as folding laundry. It is the film's focus on everyday tasks, their dignity and importance, that mark it out as different. Rhoda as a downtrodden, hooded figure appears to be as alone as the Russian cosmonaut whose story she tells to John. Initially, she chooses her post-prison isolation, taking up a job as a janitor and house cleaner. Her preference for this type of job seems to be a refusal to engage with the intellectual brilliance that made the younger Rhoda arrogant; as a cleaner, Rhoda is invisible, not required to talk or engage with others. Therefore, when she discovers that John has survived the accident and awakened from a coma, she decides to seek him out at his home under the pretence that she is from a cleaning service. As he begins grudgingly to accept her cleaning of his house, he begins to see her qualities, and there is never a sense that they are anything but intellectual equals. The impression of Rhoda as exceptional remains underscored by the quiet gentleness of Marling's performance, and as she becomes more comfortable with John, her flashing intelligence begins slowly to reassert itself.

As with the transformation of the shore landscape, the film makes careful use of setting in John's house. The fact that it is an unfinished restoration project, utterly abandoned since the death of his wife and son, is everywhere apparent. Walls are stripped back to the studs, plaster is cracked and blistered. The past crumbles, and the future does not yet exist for John until Rhoda appears to perform the act of cleaning as care, as atonement, but also as something dignified and worthy of doing. She becomes an unwitting 'archaeologist of the present' (Forlani 76), sifting through the detritus of John's life, and uncovering the healing man. She is the one who brings order to the house, clearing away the evidence of the endless takeaway meals and heavy drinking that have punctuated John's life since his coma, cleaning the kitchen, polishing a delicate collection of glass dishes, but also concealing and ordering photographs of the dead and sheets of unfinished music. Lest this, with its growing suggestion of intimacy between John and Rhoda, seem too utopian, the film's ending remains unsettling. As the figure who appears in Rhoda's driveway implies, Earth 2 ceased to be a 'mirror Earth' at the moment of mutual discovery, opening up divergent timelines.

Another Earth can also be considered as an alternate history, which Andy Duncan defines as 'history as we know it changed for dramatic and often ironic effect' (209). While Another Earth does not take up real historical events, its grounding in our own recognisable world, with only commercial space travel and the discovery of Earth 2 as its definitive sf markers, suggests an alternate development of our very recent past. The discovery of the parallel Earth offers a clear point of divergence that sets up the...